How MAGA Loyalists Are Already Trying to Muddy the Midterm Elections

Daily News

Is there a “polite” way to undermine democracy? John Eastman thinks so. The attorney, who drafted the memos that underpinned Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results, was recorded telling a group of prospective Republican poll watchers in New Mexico last week that they should monitor the voting process and create a record that could be used to attack the integrity of unfavorable results — but to do so “gingerly,” with “a smile.”

“Document what you’ve seen, raise the challenge, and [note] which of the judges on that election board decline to accept your challenge,” Eastman said October 19, according to audio obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to media outlets. “Get it all written down,” continued Eastman, a key figure in the January 6 committee’s investigation into last year’s insurrection at the Capitol. “That then becomes the basis for an affidavit in a court challenge after the fact.”

This approach — to manufacture a pretext for an election challenge — appears, on its face, to be less aggressive than, say, the armed poll watchers who have been observed in Arizona. But the idea, broadly speaking, is roughly the same: To gum up the electoral process and make it as painful as possible to cast, count, and certify votes. “You’ve got a bunch of poll watchers who are preconditioned to believe there is wrongdoing,” Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of the bipartisan election watchdog group Issue One, told Politico, which was first to report on Eastman’s recent comments. “They’re going to start documenting stuff that is not wrongdoing and they might also intentionally misdocument something just for the sake of being able to hold up or not certify an election, which is terrifying,” Penniman continued, warning that Eastman’s call for partisans to seek out election board positions could produce a “potential nightmare we’ve never had to deal with before” in previous American elections.

In the two years since the 2020 election, Trump’s election lies have fueled a wave of anti-voting laws in states across the country, including in Texas and Florida; made election denialism a key tenet of 2022 GOP campaigns; and led to increased harassment against election workers. Attempts to undermine the vote have “snowballed enormously” since 2020, as Tana de Zulueta, director of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which expressed concerns about the upcoming election in a report this week, told the New York Times.

The legal threats and the threats of violence have been intertwined from the start. In 2020, Eastman drafted bogus legal strategies for Trump to steal the election — including a plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to essentially throw out electors key to Joe Biden’s victory and to declare Trump the victor. When Pence refused to go along with it on January 6, Eastman helped Trump rile up an angry mob of MAGA faithfuls, telling them that “we know there was fraud.” After Trump sicced those supporters on the Capitol, with some apparently seeking to execute Pence, Eastman suggested to one of the former vice president’s aides that the violence was his fault.

“Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Pence aide Greg Jacob wrote in an email to Eastman in the midst of the January 6 insurrection.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman replied, according to an exchange published by the Washington Post last year. 

Such lies are already sowing discord. In Nevada, for instance, swirling election conspiracy theories forced a county to undertake a time-consuming hand count this week, before it was paused by the state Supreme Court Thursday night in what the ACLU called a “victory for all who believe in democracy.” And, of course, there are the reports of gun-brandishing vigilantes patrolling drop boxes, the subject of some of the most pervasive 2020 election conspiracy theories, in Arizona. 

What will come of all this? It’s hard to say. But it is clear that the antidemocratic movement has continued to grow since 2020, and will continue to erode confidence in the process: “We’re all here because of what happened in 2020,” Marshall Yates, an official with the Election Integrity Network and former chief of staff to insurrectionist Congressman Mo Brooks, said at the New Mexico summit with Eastman last week. “The election objection did not go as we wanted in 2020, on January 6, ” Yates continued. “But luckily it sparked a grassroots movement across the country for election integrity. And without all of us rising up and…putting our foot down and saying, ‘No, we will not let what happened in 2020 ever happen again,’ we wouldn’t be in this room.”

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